ABSTRACT
During the 1970 and 1980s, the Western world was barraged with predictions of a coming New Age of peace and light destined to arrive early in the twenty-first century. This New Age movement, as it came to be called, was initially directed at the followers of the Western esoteric tradition, those individuals who followed occult and metaphysical spiritual teachings as exemplified in Theosophy and New Thought. As the movement found a response, those older occult and metaphysical organizations grew most accepting of it, and many new ones formed. Then, during the early 1990s, enthusiasm for a coming New Age waned and by the end of the decade all but disappeared, though it left a strengthened and revitalized occult/metaphysical community as its legacy.
